How to play it

The Battleship game Basics – Play it with pen and paper

To play battleship with pen and paper you need to have two players. Each player needs a piece of paper and a pencil to play the game.

How to play it?

Each player has to draw two 10 x 10 grid on the paper they have. The grids need labeling with some letters on the top. You must number the sides. You can label one among the several grids as Self and the other grid you have should be labeled as Opponent.

Before you start playing you have to make a collection of aircraft carrier, destroyer, a battleship, a cruiser and a submarine. Each boat takes different amount of squares on the grid:

Aircraft carrier 5 squares

Battleship 4 squares

Destroyer 3 squares

Submarine 3 squares

Patrol boat 2 squares

Decide on your own how many of each you will use, but make sure you do not use to many as the grid will be too full. For the 10×10 grid it is recommended to use one of each types of boats on your grid. For the 15×15 game you should boost up the game by having 1x aircraft carrier, 2x battleship, 3x destroyer, 4x submarine and 5x patrol boat. This will make the game more interesting and longer to play.

On the lower grid you can place your ships at any place you prefer to. However, you need to place the ships either vertically or horizontally. However, according to classic battleship ruler the ships should not be placed diagonally. After you have completed positioning the ships the game is soon to begin.

Which player will first start the game? This you can vote and decide.

The whole point of this game is to look and find out where are your opponents ship and sink them before he/she sinks yours. When your turn comes you have to declare a square on the opponents grid and hope to hit the target. The opponent has to state whether you hit his ship or not.

Once your opponent charges you must declare whether it is a hit or a miss. In any case if your ship is near to the coordinates then you can make a hit. You have to keep a total record of the hits and misses. This you can do by making use of the upper gridding system. The red pegs are used to mark the hits and you can use the whites to mark the misses.

Your hitting should be constant and once you can locate your opponents ship you must make sure to cover it with pegs. Ships which are too damaged get sunk and you cannot recover them in any way.

You have to continue playing the game till one side loses all the ships and make a final declaration. In the process the other player becomes a winner.

In case you are tired of playing the game in the similar way you can make use of variants. You can make the game long and you can even increase the target. Rather than 10 x 10 you can make use of a graph of 20 x 20. This will bring improvement to the game.